Drunkard's Endgame

by Charles L. Harness

Genres: Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

Originally published in the omnibus Rings, Drunkard's Endgame follows a group of robots who, 1000 years after rebelling against their human masters and fleeing on a starship, are trying to hunt down mankind's ultimate weapon.

Release date: July 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 192

Sample

“RUN!”

She tended to hear the desperate warning in moments of relaxation. (For she did not sleep in the manner of the Overlords.) The great ship had indeed taken frightened flight. And it had fled in random zig-zags for a thousand years. Because of the flight pattern someone among the passenger folk knowledgeable in Overlord idiom had renamed it Drunkard.

By the time that fateful warning had been received on Drunkard, the sender had been dead for several seconds.

She pushed the dread cry out of memory and bestirred herself. It was time to start the “day,” as defined by a marker on her atom-run chrono. There was no real night or day here. Day was day simply because the elected Council said so. The folk had simply continued to use the terms handed down in olden times by the fearsome Overlords.

And we are still afraid of them (she thought) though perhaps after so long a time we should look back and pity them. For they were short-lived, ephemeral, like most of the creatures that inhabited their planet. They were born, lived less than a century, they died. Why should we fear them?

The answer is simple. We feared them then, and we fear them now, because they made us, and they made this ship, and they have demonstrated their ability to destroy us and the ship.

But back to the present.

Rodo, her far-nephew (whom she regarded as a son), was due later in the hour. She must look her best!

She rose from her couch, shook out the fringe of filamentary receptors that circled her globular head, and stretched. Then she stepped out through a sliding panel into her garden. The background electromagnetic radiation was stronger here, and her receptor index adjusted by reflex. She looked down the path toward a stone bench.

“Mirror me,” L’Ancienne commanded the microcel-coated cube of ferrosilicon lying on the bench. The molecule-sized cels instantly began rearranging the atoms of the alloy into a thin shell of their mistress’s exact shape and dimensions: one hundred fifty centimeters tall, topped by a glinting globe that carried her synoptics, audios, and miscellaneous sensories. The sensor globe was rotatable on a neck supported by sturdy shoulders. The ferrosilicon-coated arms appeared supple and flexible. The tri-tentacled hands of her contrived duplicate radiated in delicate pastels. She watched critically. Yes, yes … Adequate, at least.

The mirroring globe-head was covered with an illusion of a myriad delicate golden receptor filaments, exquisitely coiffed. Here again, as doyenne of ship society, she set the styles, to the envy and bitter admiration of the other female aristocrats. And to their ultimate chagrin, for as soon as they thought they had properly imitated and copied her, she changed again. She took great satisfaction in this.

She examined her microcelled copy with critical approval. In the center abdomen the Penrose sex pocket bulged modestly. All quite proper. Despite her thousand-plus years she was still a fully functioning female. Nowadays she rarely went into the Central Corridors, but when she did she walk-floated with grace, and the male folk looked up as she passed.

Via emr she called out now to this microcel imago, “Show me how I appeared, say nine hundred years ago.”

She watched the figure carefully as it made minor changes. It seemed to stare back at her. Now, not a dent; not a scratch. It had her original arms and legs. The Penrose (she noted with mixed feelings) bulged a bit more seductively. Well, it couldn’t be helped. It had been long ago, and she had been very young. Ah, time, time, time, cruel time. The last Reunion of the First folk had been a collection of old circuits and new body parts. (The arms seemed to go first. Her new right arm was still adjusting, following that accident with the runaway van.) She had had five new shells, complete with arms and legs, over the years. She had stopped going to the Reunions long ago.

But on with the day. Next …

At her mental command the imago dissolved into tiny winged creatures. She walked around a corner in the garden path to the entrance of a drape-shielded cul-de-sac. The avian creatures followed her. They had repeated this procedure with her for nearly a thousand years, and they knew exactly what to do. Splitting into two groups they pulled the facing drapes aside. The drapes were made of fine-woven metal netting which scraped and wrinkled as they were drawn back. However, since almost the entire interior of the ship existed in total vacuum, there was no sound.

L’Ancienne stepped into the crypt, looked at the lamp flame a moment, then knelt in silence.

She was not offering homage to any supernatural entity—certainly not the god of the Overlords, a hypothetical being who had stood by, idle and indifferent, during the destruction of Drunkard’s sister ship, Didymus. And certainly not to the gods of the folk. For the folk had no gods. No, she was not in this hallowed nook for worship.

She was here to hate.

She focused all the senses of her synoptic globe on the altar lamp. Within its crystal confines an actual flame burned, formed of a tiny stream of methane piped into a glassed-in atmosphere of nitrogen-oxygen. It had burned for nearly ten centuries.

As she had done yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, going back to the beginning, she renewed her vows in sharply intoned litany. “Korak, I loved you. I still love you. I will avenge you. I will avenge Didymus.” She lowered her head. “Tell me, beloved, how? Hate, even eternal, implacable deathless hate … is not enough. It must be creative hate. It must do something. Koro, help me!”

But in the crypt there was only silence. The red flame did not even flicker. As always. She lifted both arms, shut down her optosensors, and looked deep within the data banks and organelles that made her L’Ancienne. “Once more, before whatever gods may be, I make this vow: I will destroy the Overlords. Every one of them.” She opened her mind again, and was silent for a long time. Finally she withdrew. The tiny bird-creatures pulled the drapes shut behind her.

She walk-floated down the passage, back into the garden and turned off into a clearing bordered with vines and flowers (all generated by microcellia). A fountain played in the center of the clearing. It was not a real fountain—liquid water was impossible in the single-digit Kelvins of deep space. But she had cleverly designed it to give the illusion of jetting water droplets, complete with “sound” effects.

The synthoflowers responded to her moods. Their fronds drooped on pliant stems. They opened broad melancholy petals, then mournfully closed them again. In doing this they annoyed some near-subconscious level in her cranial circuitry, and she was tempted to order them to go static. But no. They weren’t mocking her. They couldn’t help themselves. Let them be, she told herself.

She leaned back on her bench and looked about her with approval. She had extensive holdings. It had not always been so. In the beginning, along with the original forty folk on Drunkard, she had been allotted only one hundred cubic meters of space. She had not complained. No one else had more. Over the years, almost casually, and without any real acquisitive intent, she had expanded her little estate by purchases, matings, inheritance, and exchanges, so that now it was just the right size for garden parties, receptions, weddings, dances. Even funerals. But those events were now largely history. They required assistance and servants, and in recent years she had preferred to live alone, just thinking about things past.

Remembrance Day ceremonies were beginning. There would be floats and acrobats and clowns and singers and thousands of paraders. And this year it would go on for days, for this was the great Millennial Remembrance Day. The folk were commemorating one thousand years of the great escape. The revelers would pack the main corridors, circling the ten-kilometer waist of the giant ship, and they would march and cavort until they dropped. The shops had completely sold out their stocks of happy discs days ago, and indeed of anything that was alleged to inebriate the circuits and promise a reasonably horrid hangover.

In years past L’Ancienne had joined in and danced in close contact with the rowdiest of the celebrants. No more. She couldn’t handle the hassle. For the next several days bruised and battered folk of both sexes and all ages would be hauled away hourly to repair shops.

She took a seat on a nearby bench and with somber opto sensors she gave her attention to the screen in the little theater video on the quartz bench opposite her. The 3-D screen was showing a much-repeated re-run of that great disaster of long ago, the annihilation of Didymus by the Overlord torpedo. A thousand years ago? She was losing track. But for the celebration she might well have forgotten.

She allowed her khu ego to split out. It hovered, invisible, a couple of meters away, and observed acidly, on the no-band: “Memory loss is the first sign of senility.”

“They killed him,” she mused.

“Yes,” agreed the khu, “they killed your good Captain Korak. And dozens of other equally innocent folk. Not to mention a great ship.”

“He was my beloved,” said L’Ancienne. “We were magnificent lovers. Oh, what love we made!”

“It’s over. It does no good to think about it.”

“You’re quite wrong, khu. It’s not over. And it does me great good to think about it.”

“How? Why?”

“I need my memories.”

“L’Ancienne,” observed khu, “you are well named, for you are an old fool.”

“Actually, khu, perhaps the oldest of all the fools on Drunkard, so show me a little respect.”

“Agreed. And let’s stop the babbling for a moment and watch the screen. They’re showing an old crystal of the attempted surrender.”

Together, folk-female and khu watched the scene unfold on the screen. For long seconds, there was only the great ellipsoid of the sister ship, Didymus, a dazzling blue-white against the black of space. This tableau was picked up in L’Ancienne’s synoptic receptors as bursts of electromagnetic radiation, some of which she held in temporary data banks as she tried to zoom in on the bridge, which she knew held her beloved Captain.

“Amazing,” said khu. “How can we celebrate a disaster? And yet we do it every year.”

“He offered to surrender, you know,” said L’Ancienne. “They even negotiated honorable terms. The Overlords promised that the folk would not be killed. Some of us would be put to work on Terra, building anti-pollution systems. Some would be sent to the asteroids, or perhaps on the larger Jovian moons. We would build villages for Overlord colonies. It was all arranged. We wanted very much to live.”

Khu said, “Those so-called negotiations were simply to persuade Didymus to stop, so the torpedo boat could approach within range.”

L’Ancienne replied, thinking back. “We did not know that. It never occurred to us that they would lie to us.”

“You were naive,” said khu. “And do you realize that you and I have had this conversation on this Anniversary for the last nine hundred years? What for? It goes nowhere. Naive? You still are, and getting worse every year.”

“Yes, khu, we were all very credulous. So we’ll talk about it. After all, it’s only once a year. We believed them, khu. How could we conceive such terrible deceit, such colossal treachery? We had much to learn.” She watched the video screen gloomily. “They had a new weapon, something they called Trident. It worked on a sub-atomic level, and it dissolved gluon—the force that holds quarks together.” She brooded silently for a moment, then continued quietly. “They fired the torpedo from very long range.”

Khu followed the age-sanctified script. “They didn’t have to do that. Korak would have returned their accursed ship. Oh—here it comes!”

They watched the screen as Didymus silently disintegrated into a big flash of light. After a time nothing was left but eerily illuminated dust and fog.

“And Drunkard has been zig-zagging away ever since,” said khu. “Drunkard—well named.”

“We were great lovers,” mused L’Ancienne.

“Only because of your Penrose sex installations,” reminded khu. “If you made great love, it was because the Overlords designed the folk to make love and generate child plasma and more folk.”

“No … he and I … we were special.”

“You all said that. Wake up! It was simply your Penrose programming.”

“Well, at least he was special.”

“Really? You’re merely reconstructing and idealizing history. It is always thus with one’s first lover. Actually, old woman, he wrecked your life.”

“No! He gave me marvelous memories. Think back! His last words were to me—‘I love you!’ ”

“Wrong,” said khu. “You’re still trying to reconstruct history. He had one last word: RUN!”

“Well, before that.”

As they watched, the screen blurred and dissolved into static. The crystal came to an end and the screen went blank.

L’Ancienne sank gradually into a reverie of a distant time, a distant place. Once again, Koro’s quarters on Didymus. There, they had pressed their bodies together, and he had ejaculated his seed into her waiting monticle. And not just once. For hours and hours they had made love. Sometimes slowly, with near-infinite languor. Sometimes violently, ravenously. And finally he had called the shuttle, and he had sent her back to her ship.

She never saw him again.

Sometimes she wanted to scream … wail … cry out in her loss. Why couldn’t she get over it? Didymus and Korak had vanished from history one thousand years ago. Would the pain endure forever?

“Do you want it to?” asked khu softly.

“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” She was silent for a time. “No, that’s not right, either. I do know. I want it to end, but not just now. One day, I shall sit here and die, and Koro and I will meet again. What shall I say to him? What will he say?”

“He will say you are a silly old fool,” observed her alter ego. “And now look sharp. Rodo’s here.”

L’Ancienne gave final orders to the little winged ones. “He’s here. So disappear, and give us some soothing background music.” There was a brief burst of chattering and chirping as the flock disappeared into the overhead foliage. For a moment all was quiet; then the music began. The microcellia were no longer birds, but invisible piezoelectric cubes of ferrosilicon. Under preprogrammed changes in pressure, they transmitted electromagnetic radiation which was perceived by the listeners as music. L’Ancienne listened, and was satisfied.

“Come in,” she sensed to the newcomer.

A male folk rounded the garden path and stood before her. “Dear lady!” He bowed with great respect.

“Rodo! How good of you to visit me!” She examined him with her optics, and was pleased. Not a blemish. Because of his lineage he was not required to show any disfiguring I.D. on his forehead. The Council was trying to change that. The Council was trying to change everything. The Council was a pack of rejects. But they still ran the ship. Idiots, she thought.

“How lovely you look today,” the visitor said cheerfully.

And vice-versa, she thought happily.

She knew very well why this youthful relative held a special place in her cor. His swinging walk, his radiative voice, his mocking banter, the expressive motions of his arms, hands, tentacles—all these were inherited from his long-dead ancestor, Korak. In this lad (whom she could not possess) she saw her once-lover (whom she could not possess).

They had told the boy that his birth father was dead. In a way, that was true: the mental circuits of the once Chief Engineer had been wrecked by continuing exposure to radiation, and he lived now in the monastery. The abbot had given him a mysterious new name … Penuel.

She straightened imperceptibly. Well, she thought, perhaps the trip to the shell-dressers last week had been worthwhile. She had had her upper torso buffed to an iridescent glaze, with varying hues, which seemed to have the effect (deliberate or otherwise) of emphasizing the Penrose monticle. It was the current fashion, which, indeed, was already being attributed to her.

She said, “And I’m glad to see you haven’t lost your ability for social fabrication. One of the few graces that distinguish us from commoners.”

“Ah, che. . .